Our guest blogger is Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch.

This morning, a federal appeals court struck down key elements of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency clean-air rule designed to make sweeping reductions in air pollution from coal-fired electric power plants in the Eastern half of the nation. The suit brought on behalf of the coal-burning industry has crippled the signature air pollution control effort by the Bush Administration. It’s the legal equivalent of a dirty bomb: literally tens of thousands of Americans could see their lives cut short by dirty air.

This decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to vacate the Clean Air Interstate Rule is without a doubt the worst news of the year when it comes to air pollution. It is potentially disastrous news for public health. In the words of Conrad Schneider, advocacy director of the Clean Air Task Force, “This decision will leave tens of millions of Americans exposed to dirty air. It will mean avoidable death and disease.”

The Bush administration needs to do more than file the obvious legal appeal: it needs to come up with a fix that is legally foolproof. If the Bush administration isn’t up to the task, then Congress must step in and fix this mess — the bipartisan legislation introduced by Senator Tom Carper (D-DE) is one obvious vehicle.

The villain in this case is the coal-burning electric power industry. No wonder some are starting to call Duke Chairman and CEO Jim Rogers the Duke Dirt Devil. Rogers — supposedly a “green” leader — led an industry attack because he wanted to save a little money rather than clean up.

When it announced the rules in March 2005, the EPA itself projected that they would prevent 17,000 premature deaths a year. The vast majority of those avoided deaths would happen because of reductions in electric power emissions of sulfur dioxide, which chemically convert to deadly fine-particle soot. To quote from then-acting EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, the rule “will result in the largest pollution reductions and health benefits of any air rule in more than a decade.” So you can see what we are losing.

After over a year of battles with the White House and other federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency has published its response to the April 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA, which mandated that the agency determine whether greenhouse gases pose a threat to our health and welfare and take action in response. With today’s publication of an “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson ignores the threat and attacks the rule of law.

Johnson published his staff’s document — after extensive cuts from the White House — with complaints attached from the White House Office of Management and Budget, the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Transportation, the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, and the Department of Energy.

In one voice, the other agencies attack the use of the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases as “deeply flawed and unsuitable,” “fundamentally ill-suited,” “extraordinarily intrusive and burdensome,” “unilateral and extraordinarily burdensome,” “drastic,” “dramatic,” “excessive,” “extremely expensive,” and “costly and burdensome.” The clear and present threat of global warming is dismissed as a “complex” issue that hinges on “interpretation of statutory terms.”

Sadly, Johnson decided to join them, attacking the immense work done by his staff to address the catastrophic threat of climate change:

I believe the ANPR demonstrates the Clean Air Act, an outdated law originally enacted to control regional pollutants that cause direct health effects, is ill-suited for the task of regulating global greenhouse gases.

In his press conference announcing the release of today’s decision, Johnson reiterated his opinion that the Clean Air Act is the “wrong tool” for the task, “trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”

This is yet another case where Johnson is following the example of the likes of disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who made similar statements about the Geneva Conventions’ ban on torture as White House Counsel:

As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.

Similarly, the White House’s arguments in defense of ignoring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s ban on warrantless wiretapping:

Reverting to the outdated FISA statute risks our national security. FISA’s outdated provisions created dangerous intelligence gaps, which is why Congress passed the Protect America Act in the first place.

George W. Bush, Stephen Johnson, and the other officers of the executive branch swore an oath to “faithfully execute” their office and defend the Constitution. They have evidently decided to break that vow, time and again. In the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the Bush administration, it’s always the “quaint,” “outdated,” “burdensome,” and “ill-suited” laws that are the problem — never their reckless abandonment of principle and duty.

Digg It!

UPDATE: At Solve Climate, David Sassoon offers his take on Stephen Johnson:

The tragedy of a small person, ill-suited to this historical moment, unable to rise to the occasion, doing the bidding of the self-proclaimed “world’s biggest polluter.”

UPDATE II: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI): “We cannot afford an Environmental Protection Agency that does not protect the environment. If Administrator Johnson cannot lead this great agency in the manner the American people deserve to see it led, he should step down and let someone else try.”

Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA): “On global warming, the White House uses the slash-and-burn technique. They slash any meaningful statements or action on global warming, and allow the planet to burn.”

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA): “This means that the Clean Air Act, signed by Richard Nixon and carried out by every President since, has been shredded by President Bush, who will go down in history as the first president to so gravely endanger the health and safety of the American people.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK): “If Congress does not act, then the resulting regulations could be the largest regulatory intrusion into Americans personal lives, a nightmare scenario. Big brother is alive and well in the career ranks at the EPA.”

Go to the US Climate Action Network for collected responses from member organizations.

Welcome to any U.S. News and World Report readers who came here because of my piece, “The U.S. Needs to End Its Energy Dependence: This dependence is economically unsustainable and dangerous for our children.” The piece will be in the print edition Monday! [I will provide links to back up the article's assertiaons below.]

The contrary view, “Energy Independence Is Neither Practical nor Attainable” — that our situation is hopeless, and we must focus on short term solutions — was provided by one J. Robinson West. I know you will be surprised to learn that he is chairman of the oil and gas consulting firm PFC Energy, a former U.S. assistant secretary of the interior under President Reagan, and a [buckshot-free] friend of Dick Cheney’s.

It is also not surprising that he attacks ethanol but never once mentions plug-in hybrids or electricity as an alternative fuel — even though plug ins are a core solution to our rising oil dependence and “electricity is the only alternative fuel that can lead to energy independence.”

It is a tad surprising that he says, “For the past 25 years, the U.S. government has painlessly and shortsightedly encouraged consumption and discouraged production” — since, as we’ve seen, it is conservatives lead by his former boss who have fought efforts to promote conservation and efficiency (see “Who got us in this energy mess? Start with Ronald Reagan“) and since more production (even if it were possible) can’t make a dent in our energy problem, especially as he defines it, which is our vulnerability to soaring global oil prices, a point we agree on.

It is even more suprising that he has the chutzpah to explicitly beat his chest about how politicians have ignored higher mileage standards and mass transit. He must know that it is conservatives like him, Reagan, and Cheney who have fought those policies. It is especially lame that he criticizes government research on solutions as inadequate when his former boss is the one who cut funding for this research 85%!

But what is staggering to me is that this guy is an extreme peak-oiler, although you would never know it from this piece. You’d have to spend a little time on Google to find this stunning quote of his from Newsweek a mere two years ago:

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When will our long national nightmare finally end? When will the Bush Administration stop waterboarding future generations, stop cannibalizing their future?

The Washington Post reports today:

The Bush administration has decided not to take any new steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions before the president leaves office, despite pressure from the Supreme Court and broad accord among senior federal officials that new regulation is appropriate now.

To defer compliance with the Supreme Court’s demand, the White House has walked a tortured policy path, editing its officials’ congressional testimony, refusing to read documents prepared by career employees and approved by top appointees, requesting changes in computer models to lower estimates of the benefits of curbing carbon dioxide, and pushing narrowly drafted legislation on fuel-economy standards that officials said was meant to sap public interest in wider regulatory action.

[Note to WP's Eilperin and Smith: Double kudos for the ironic use of the word "tortured."]

OK, it’s a dog-bites-man story for one of the FHA’s “Worst Leaders of All Time.” We’ve seen again and again that if anyone in the world knows how best to sap the public’s interest in energy and climate action, that would be President Nero Chamberlain Hannibal Lector Bush.

But one is drawn to the perverse genius of the climatic evil-doers in the White House, much as the villains in the best movies, like Silence of the Lambs, are always more interesting than the heroes. Consider the absurd analytical lengths the administration has gone to devalue the future benefits of climate action:

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Climate Progress has blogged on Plug-in Hybrid Elective Vehicles (PHEVs) many times because they are an important part of the climate solution and because electricity is the only alternative fuel that can lead to energy independence. But certain questions keep coming up in comments, so here’s a short FAQ.

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